Volume 48, Number 4 · March 8, 2001
The Road from Mandalay
By Pico Iyer
The Glass Palace
by Amitav Ghosh
Random House, 475 pp., $25.95
Although the British formally left India more than half a century ago, their presence still sits at the center of that culture like a picture of Miss Havisham's lost fiancé. It has been tempting—too tempting, perhaps—to place all the Indian writers recently so conspicuous in the West on a spectrum represented at its poles by Salman Rushdie on the left, trying to get back at the Empire by turning its very language and literature into sentences as crowded and noisy as the streets of an Indian city, and, on the right, V.S. Naipaul, perfecting a style more Augustan and austere than even that of his historical masters, and writing with a self-conscious concern for clarity, and for making fastidious discriminations, in an international world ever more without a center.
Review, 3555 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |